The Slatterys were considered nothing more but "white trash". Tom Slattery owned a three acre piece of land along the swamp bottoms between the river and the Wilkes' plantation, also neighbouring with the O'Hara plantation.

Gerald O'Hara got along with all his neighbours except the MacIntoshes, who were a "close mouthed and stiff-necked family, who kept strictly to themselves and intermarried with their Carolina relatives", and, of course, the Slattery clan.

According to the book, The Stlatterys, being poor white, "...were not even accorded the grudging respect that Angus MacIntosh's dour independence wrung from neighboring families."

Tom Slattery had received repeated offers from the O'Hara and Wilkes families to buy his land, and he could have sold his farm for three times his value to any planter in the County. "They would have considered it money well spent to rid the community of an eyesore, but he was well satisfied to remain and subsist miserably on the proceeds of a bale of cotton a year and the charity of his neighbors."

Mr. Slattery is described as 'shiftless' and 'whining', and his wife a snarly-haired woman, "sickly and washed-out of appearance, the mother of a brood of sullen and rabbity-looking children - a brood which increased regularily every year."

The Slattery family owned no slaves, and all that was done to tend the cotton was when Tom and his two oldest boys would spasmodically work their three acres. Mrs. Slattery and her younger children would tend a small vegetable patch, but due to her 'consistant childbearing', the garden seldom produced enough to feed the ever-growing family.

Evidently, Tom Slattery was not too proud to beg for a cotton seed for planting or a side of bacon to "tide him over" on the porches of his neighbours. "Slattery hated his neighbors with what little energy he possessed, sensing their contempt beneath their courtesy".

Any reader of this novel cannot forget Emmie Slattery. It was a sense of delight for Scarlett to ponder over the father of the baby Emmie gives birth to near the beginning of the novel. "Scarlett suspected Jonas Wilkerson, for she had frequently seen him walking down the road with Emmie at nightfall."

Scarlett's suspicions were probably correct, for Jonas Wilkerson was dismissed from Tara (he was their overseer), and later on in the novel he returns with Emmie Slattery as his wife and trying to purchase Tara.

There you have it! There isn't all that much about the Slatterys. In the movie it is only Emmie that we meet.